This invention relates to artificial intelligence, and more particularly, to a rules based system and a technique of customizing and implementing rules which increases the efficiency of operation of these rules.
Rules based systems have become prevalent as a technique of managing complex business, database and logistical systems over the past several years. Prior art systems implementing techniques of generating and updating rules in an exemplary database management system are described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,875,440 and 5,899,991, (xe2x80x9cthe ""440xe2x80x9d and ""991 patent, respectively) owned by the Assignee of the present invention. Another prior art reference discussing the use of a knowledge engineering tool containing a plurality of xe2x80x9cif thenxe2x80x9d rules is described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,970,658 to Durbin. The Durbin system selects rules from a knowledge base and routes those rules to object processors having access to the objects referenced in the rule. However, this results in a large number of rules being executed since every time an object is encountered that has access to the rules, the rules must fire. This results in wasted overhead in terms of processing power, etc. Additionally, the rules are difficult to update and manipulate.
Artificial intelligence is sometimes used in data access management and data warehousing. In these fields of endeavor, it is desirable to have a system which prohibits problematic data access, and allows the database to be accessed and managed in a manner that does not result in significant decreased performance. Additionally, any such systems should provide for flexibility that these rules systems as applied to database management should preferably learn as transactions take place. Accordingly, there is a need for an efficient rules systems for managing problems such as, for example, database access, which can learn and manipulate its rules but which does not result in significant degradation of performance through the use of extensive amounts of processing power.
The above and other problems of the prior art are overcome in accordance with the present invention which relates to a system which uses a series of rule templates to generate specific rules. In accordance with a preferred embodiment of the invention, the rules may be fired based upon certain items in the problem domain object or values of attributes associated therewith. Moreover, the rules may be dynamic and periodic, and may fire only at selected times when selected conditions are present.